Thanks for the information on the boards. Perhaps I will finally find something reasonable to replace me 785evo with. Do you know if these boards are up on newegg yet? As for the AMD bs Intel dispute I believe that this was a topic regarding the release of them motherboards and not the performance that bulldozer offered in compairison to sandy bridge. Although it makes nice bed time reading to read the views expressed in regards to that. Have a good night/day!

The last time AMD released a completely new architecture was the glory days of the Athlon.

If they can do as well as they have by using the same basic architecture since then, I think that they will be able to pull off something really special with a completely new one.

Of course, that is just my opinion, and I could very well be wrong. Hopefully the wait to find out won't be too long.

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I think so as well,though the delay has kind of impacted my expectations of just how good Bulldozer will be.
Even if it isn't has fast as a i7 2600K,it should be as good as the i5 2500K. As long as it competes with the 2nd. gen i5,I'll be happy with Bulldozer. Only being as good as 1st gen i5 or i7 would be disappointing. It would leave AMD 2 generations behind again once Sandy Bridge-E is out.

I think so as well,though the delay has kind of impacted my expectations of just how good Bulldozer will be.
Even if it isn't has fast as a i7 2600K,it should be as good as the i5 2500K. As long as it competes with the 2nd. gen i5,I'll be happy with Bulldozer. Only being as good as 1st gen i5 or i7 would be disappointing. It would leave AMD 2 generations behind again once Sandy Bridge-E is out.

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I'm not too worried about Sandy Bridge-E because I'm pretty sure that that is going to be way out of my price range. I think that the 8 core Bulldozers have a really good shot at surpassing the 2600k though. I am just speculating though, because I have the same amount of info about Bulldozers performance as almost everyone else.

anyone else worried how AMD keeps pushing eight core CPUs as "gaming CPUs". they did the same crap with their fraud Phenom II six core units which routinely had the same FPS as their four core alternatives and both where spanked by Intel's new SB dual core CPUs. I would like to upgrade to a new BD CPU in the future but not if AMD's sales pitch is "more cores for your money..." instead of "we have a CPU that can compete with Intel's SB core for core (or at least be in the same ballpark" :shadedshu

This is quite offtopic, but... why are people praising Sandy Bridge as second coming?
Core i5 2500(K) and Core i7 2600(K) are good, even great, but at the same time... quite unimpressive
(Performance-wise) when compared to Core i7 920, they are not that much better.

What is impressive is lowered power usage (thanks to new, 32 nm process), overclock potential (again, thanks to 32 nm process) and price (probably also thanks to 32 nm process).

I just don't see Sandy Bridge as anything other than shrink with tweaks.

As for the main topic of this thread, I'm looking forward to 990-based motherboard reviews. I wanna see if there's any performance improvement due to chipset, maybe better power usage, etc
Most of all, I'm hoping for cheap 990X motherboards

Initially AMD wanted to release Llano in Q1 2011 and launch BD at Q2. They had some issues with the 32nm process (global-foundries) earlier on and they missed that window by one Quarter.

OEMs know and AMD knows that Llano APUs occupies a larger market share than High End CPUs like Bulldozer, so they chose to ramp up Llanos production.

What happened could be pressure from OEMs, ODMs for more Llano APUs in order to have a lot o products for Summer and the Back to School season in September, so AMD chose to use all the 32nm production capacity to manufacture more Llano APUs. As i have said before Global-Foundries 32nm SOI HKMG process is new and they only have one fab and releasing both Llano and BD at the same time could hurt Llanos production.

Those 60-90 days will give a more mature 32nm process for BD manufacturing and even if BD will be released in late August or early September it could take the performance crown until Intel’s SB-E 6-Core will be introduced in Q4.

Can we get a source on this 2X improvement on the Instruction Per Clock figure?

At 2x per core that means they truly do have a killer chip there, especially at 4+ Ghz on 8 cores. From my understanding currently they are behind Intel by about 60% on IPC, if this is the case they will outperform by a margin of 40% on average per thread.

This is quite offtopic, but... why are people praising Sandy Bridge as second coming?
Core i5 2500(K) and Core i7 2600(K) are good, even great, but at the same time... quite unimpressive
(Performance-wise) when compared to Core i7 920, they are not that much better.

What is impressive is lowered power usage (thanks to new, 32 nm process), overclock potential (again, thanks to 32 nm process) and price (probably also thanks to 32 nm process).

I just don't see Sandy Bridge as anything other than shrink with tweaks.

As for the main topic of this thread, I'm looking forward to 990-based motherboard reviews. I wanna see if there's any performance improvement due to chipset, maybe better power usage, etc
Most of all, I'm hoping for cheap 990X motherboards

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Sandy Bridge is basically X58 performance at the midrange market segment, which is awesome. But other then that yes, no significant performance increase ensued with it's release, but you're getting X58 performance for cheaper with lower power consumption, higher overclock ability and at a low cost, so it's definitely a huge win for consumers really.

Sandy Bridge is basically X58 performance at the midrange market segment, which is awesome. But other then that yes, no significant performance increase ensued with it's release, but you're getting X58 performance for cheaper with lower power consumption, higher overclock ability and at a low cost, so it's definitely a huge win for consumers really.

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Which really doesn't even matter here.

Rather than AMD having the fastest CPU possible, I'd much rather see them hit the $200 and lower price range right in the face, and for them to win with performance within that segment.

Based on my own testing, Phenom II cores are still pretty good, but the memory bandwidth is lacking. If they can bring that up to P67 numbers, Bulldozer will be killer, no doubt. I have alot fo confidence that AMD might be able to pull this off, as seemingly Bulldozer is still a bit more focused towards the server market, where throughput is most important.

When considering throughput, the obvious way to increase that is with better memory bandwidth, so I do think AMD is focused on that, especially considering the "rumoured" 1866 MHz DDR3 support for Bulldozer.

Rather than AMD having the fastest CPU possible, I'd much rather see them hit the $200 and lower price range right in the face, and for them to win with performance within that segment.

Based on my own testing, Phenom II cores are still pretty good, but the memory bandwidth is lacking. If they can bring that up to P67 numbers, Bulldozer will be killer, no doubt. I have alot fo confidence that AMD might be able to pull this off, as seemingly Bulldozer is still a bit more focused towards the server market, where throughput is most important.

When considering throughput, the obvious way to increase that is with better memory bandwidth, so I do think AMD is focused on that, especially considering the "rumoured" 1866 MHz DDR3 support for Bulldozer.

Reviews coming from me on 9-series products very soon.

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They've been hitting the price for performance segment for quite sometime without much of a significant move towards larger performance increases. This is supposed to be a major redesign of the ancient K10 microarchitecture so if done right i do expect Bulldozer to push out some good numbers. I never stated Bulldozer couldn't perform up to par, especially considering what is known or rumor to know about these chips. But they have some strong competition in the performance arena and if they can get close to accomplishing the goal of providing both price while maintaining a good performance stance against P67/Z68, then it's a win/win, but it's to early to tell.

Well it's David vs Goliath. Intel's R&D budget and manpower is probably greater than AMD's entire company. Having an 85% market share helps.

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Its that big market share which makes Intel say "screw the rules" and approach innocent by-standing OEMs and force them to drop their line of AMD based systems in favour of Intel based systems or daddy wont be giving them any special treatment in the form of big discounts and free pie.

theyve been hit more then twice by Anti-trust lawsuits and its that 85% share of the market which drives them insane and want more